FEARS were expressed this week over the impact on jobs in Minehead from a near-£2 million business rates increase for the town’s largest employer Butlin’s.

The company’s holiday resort faces a staggering £3.8 million rateable value increase, a 270 per cent jump, under a new Government tax regime which business leaders warned could ‘decimate’ the rural tourism economy.

Exmoor farmer and political campaigner James Wright said nearly quadrupling Butlin’s rateable value could be a ‘catastrophic blow’ to West Somerset’s economy.

Mr Wright said draft figures from the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) showed the Butlin’s holiday resort valuation was set to skyrocket from £1.4 million to £5.2 million next April.

He said: “This ‘quadrupling’ of costs coincides with the Labour Government’s introduction of a punitive higher tax rate for larger businesses, delivering a double whammy to West Somerset’s critical leisure sector.”

Mr Wright said the tax hike was a ‘direct attack on the rural workforce’.

He said: “This is not just a tax rise for a faceless company, it is putting local jobs and investment at risk.

“You cannot hike the minimum wage, National Insurance contributions, and business rates of our biggest employer by millions and expect no consequences for the local people who work there.

“Labour is treating a seasonal tourism business like an Amazon warehouse in the Midlands.

“It is economically illiterate, and it threatens to price West Somerset out of the UK holiday market entirely.”

Butlin’s was approached for comment by the Free Press but did not respond.

The news comes a week after Wiveliscombe’s Black Bear Brewery and Bear Inn, a success story of local enterprise, revealed it was facing its own 300 per cent increase in business rates.

Owners Jon and Millie Coward, who have a network of local pubs, said the triple-digit tax hike was an ‘unholy, unreasonable, and unaffordable amount’.

They warned that finding an extra £24,000 a year simply to pay the taxman would force them to make ‘drastic changes’ just for the business to survive, squeezing the local supply chain which relied on them.

The shock increases stem from the ending next April of a post-pandemic retail, hospitality, and leisure relief scheme, which is being replaced with a permanent system containing five rates multipliers to calculate the bill owed.

Industry leaders are calling the business rates increases a ‘betrayal’.

UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls, who recently met with Mr Wright, warned that for many businesses any relief ‘will be swallowed up by the hike in the standard multiplier’, leaving them worse off than before.

Ms Nicholls said: “From April 1, 2026, the business rates landscape will change significantly for the hospitality sector.”

Campaigners are now urging the Treasury to introduce an urgent ‘hospitality cap’ for the 2026 revaluation to prevent artificial post-Covid spikes from bankrupting viable businesses in rural communities.

New rateable values cannot be formally challenged until they come into effect in April, but UKHospitality said businesses should check factual details held by the VOA for their premises and correct any errors now.